Online social networking has become an increasingly popular platform for building and maintaining one's social and professional relations. People use social networks to communicate with their real-life connections and with other people who share their interests, activities, and backgrounds. Communicating in a social network can be achieved, for example, through personal messages between users, through creating posts or commenting on other users' posts, through group discussions, and so forth.
Due to the overwhelming number of members and the vast amounts of available information, it may be difficult for a user to find other users with similar interests and backgrounds, a group dedicated to an interesting topic, event or activity, or other types of relevant information.
To address that need, social network operators establish suggestion engines that try to predict what information the user may be interested in, and provide that information to the user. The more accurate the suggestion engine is, the more users will be following its recommendations, making meaningful connections, and finding meaningful information, thereby increasing their overall satisfaction with the service.
Many factors can be taken into consideration when deciding which users and what information may be of interest to a particular user. An increasingly important factor, however, is the user's geographical location. Users living in the same geographical area (country, region, city, neighborhood) will often have more common interests, such as the local news, local events, local businesses, etc.